The existing electronic mail (email) system employed within the World Wide Web is described in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comment (RFC) 5321 entitled “Simple Mail Transfer Protocol” (SMTP) and RFC 5322 entitled “Internet Message Format,” the disclosures of which are incorporated by reference herein in there entireties.
Typically, an email is generated by a sender via an email client application and provided to an SMTP server to handle the sending of the email to a recipient. The SMTP server may communicate with other SMTP servers to deliver the email. More specifically, the email client application informs the SMTP server of the address of the sender and the address of the recipient, and provides the body of the message. In the case when the email is to be delivered to an external domain, the originating SMTP server communicates with a domain name server (DNS), which replies with the one or more Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for the SMTP server(s) for the external (destination) domain. The originating SMTP server communicates with one of the destination SMTP servers, and provides the email to the destination SMTP server. The SMTP servers communicate via server-to-server protocols.
In addition to the necessity for various server-to-server protocols, another major drawback of the existing email system is the presence of unsolicited mail (or “spam”), including its malicious forms such as phishing (i.e., attempting to acquire information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication) and virus distribution.